RE: [Ltru] Re: For review: Tagging text with no language

The meaning of zxx must be interpreted in terms of the coding standard of which it is a part. ISO 639 is explicitly about coding human languages. "No linguistic content" in the case of zxx means 'no content in any human language'. If a language tag must be applied to something like "ifdef DEBUG", then the appropriate language subtag would be zxx. ISO 639 cares not if an IETF tag zxx-Latn or zxx-progrmng is constructed; but consistency with ISO 639 would imply that the language subtag zxx be used.


Peter

From: Karen_Broome@spe.sony.com [mailto:Karen_Broome@spe.sony.com]
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2007 3:20 PM
To: Jukka K. Korpela
Cc: www-international@w3.org; ltru@lists.ietf.org
Subject: Re: [Ltru] Re: For review: Tagging text with no language


I agree with you. I would also say that indicating that computer languages have "no linguistic content" is not quite accurate for the same reasons you cite below and disagrees with the origin of the zxx tag, which was to indicate a total absence of language, not content which is not in a natural language.

Karen Broome

www-international-request@w3.org wrote on 04/13/2007 01:08:33 PM:

>
> On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Karen_Broome@spe.sony.com wrote:
>
> > With respect to computer language snippets, isn't that what the <code> tag
> > is for -- at least in XHTML?
>
> <code> has been in HTML since the beginning, and it indeed indicates
> computer code, or "computer language".
>
> But to make things more difficult, computer code - such as program code,
> operating system commands, or markup - can be regarded as being in some
> human language(s) in the sense that the identifiers may have been formed
> from words in human languages and the comments are written in some human
> languages. Knowing the language of computer code can be relevant at least
> for two purposes:
> a) the understandability of the code to human readers depends on whether
>     they understand the human language(s) used
> b) speech synthesis would benefit from the use of language information.
> Moreover, a checking program could e.g. check that the code follows the
> syntactic rules of the programming, command, or markup "language" _and_
> check the comments using a suitable human language spelling checker.
>
> Thus, I would say that the human language some text and the role of that
> text as computer code are in a sense orthogonal.
>
> --
> Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
>
>
>